What an excellent programme of events this is turning out to be. Unfortunately we couldn't go to every panel - though we would have liked to! Of the sessions we attended, highlights have included:

Bonnie Kneen (University of Pretoria, South Africa) Neither Bi Nor Particularly Sexual: The Problem With Bisexual Desire in Young Adult FictionIn this session Bonnie examined the representation of sexual desire in the bisexual protagonists of four recent young adult novels. She concluded that, in these novels, bisexual desire is desexualised, or, alternatively, the specifically sexual desires of bisexual characters are focussed on only one sex, even when such characters express romantic interest in people of different sexes. She argues that such desexualisation and monosexualisation of bisexuality reinforces the belief that bisexuality does not exist, and that this belief underpins the very bisexual invisibility and erasure that novels with bisexual protagonists ostensibly resist.

Karina Quinn (La Trobe University, Australia) Out-Law Genres and Literatures of Resistance: The Queer and Fictocritical Body in Creative Practice"When Helene Cixous told me to 'write your self. Your body must be heard', the only thing I could do was answer. The only thing I could do was to take this queer body and inscribe it with text; to make new lines, to create a different space. To write fictocritically is to sing, to speak to theory and hear its echoes, is to push myself into a narrowing place and require an opening out. The fictocritical body is already an out-law (genre be damned): it insists on being written, on writing, on leaving more than traces on a page."

Rene Kaiser (University of Amsterdam, Netherlands) 'Queerupting Coming Out: Plastifying Sexual Identity and Emerging Tactics of Body-Inscription and ActivismBy means of Rene's small-scale social science study, this session drew upon the emerging concept of plasticity (coined by the French philosopher Catherine Malabou) and applied it to 'coming out'. Plasticity threads together theories of Heideggerian authenticity, Foucauldian transsubjectivation and Butlerian ideas of effective critique. Rene spoke about identity activism centred on the queer community and how ideas of sexual identity translate into activism and vice-versa.

Key theme for discussion: Does the use of (even institutionalisation of) the term 'queer' undermine the idea of 'queerness' as resistant tocategorisation?